Cost: $26.5 million including $12 million in federal grants, $10.5 million in loans and $4 million from the University of California San Diego.

Square feet: 38,600

Construction start: July

Completion date: Summer/fall 2012

Capacity: 87 scientists and support staff

Features: Twelve laboratories, 56 offices and three conference rooms; will allow Scripps to consolidate researchers from a variety of disciplines who otherwise are split among several buildings.

Focus: Creating more efficient, accurate, and less-expensive instruments to measure physical and biochemical changes and gather population data on marine organisms; Integrating information from ocean sensors with observations of the California Current and numeric models; forecasting changes in ocean waters; collaborating with the National Marine Fisheries Service on teaching and ecosystems management.

Focus: Improving the ability of scientists to to conduct surveys for fish, marine mammals and turtles in the Pacific Ocean; allowing simultaneous collection of data on ecological factors affecting numerous species; improving predictions about effects of climate change on marine resources.

Climate and marine researchers in La Jolla are retooling to remain at the forefront of oceanography, powered by nearly $250 million in new projects.

A $56 million laboratory is going up at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and construction of a $26.5 million building is planned to start on the campus this summer. Both should be done by the end of 2012, adding 150,000 square feet of high-tech space, including a huge concrete tank for developing innoative ocean-sensing technologies.

At the same time, the National Marine Fisheries Service is building a $78 million research vessel destined for San Diego in early 2013 to extend the agency’s reach across the oceans. And the Navy is paying $88 million for a scientific ship assigned to the area starting in 2015.

These projects collectively qualify as a construction boom for scientists at the 170-acre seaside Scripps campus, which is home to one of the world’s elite marine institutions and a major federal research outpost. Scripps has close ties to the Navy and the fisheries service that go back decades.

State-of-the-art facilities help attract staff, give existing scientists room to expand, improve the speed and accuracy of experiments and likely will lead to novel ventures. Two themes run through the upgrades: improving measurements of all aspects of the seas and deepening knowledge about the interplay between physical, biological and chemical elements to better predict changes in the ocean and atmosphere.

“These investments will help keep San Diego on the cutting edge in both fisheries and oceanographic research,” said Carl Nettleton, who runs OpenOceans Global, a nonprofit group in San Diego focused on bringing together data about the world’s marine ecosystems. “The facilities will produce work that really needs to be done in ocean research that will have regional, national and international benefits.”

Federal and Scripps researchers in La Jolla have been major players in most of the significant earth-science topics of the past century, from climate change to overfishing. They have gathered decades of data about the currents off California’s coast, amassed enormous collections of sea specimens and advised governments around the world on related issues.

Most of the new construction is funded by federal stimulus money or other funding from Washington, D.C. It comes at a time when state support for the university system, including Scripps, is shrinking and campuses are being forced to look elsewhere for financial help.

James Murray, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, said federal support for science also is being scaled back.

“You’d have to say (Scripps) is very fortunate in this climate,” he said. “They came out big winners. ... I would be surprised if there are many other places that got anything close to that.”

While new facilities won’t end budget challenges, they have buoyed spirits among local scientists, some of whom have endured outdated 1960s-era offices or been displaced because their former labs are in danger of falling off the cliffs in La Jolla.

“This is a welcome expansion,” said Tony Haymet, director at Scripps. “We are a little under-accommodated at the moment.”

He said some of the biggest benefits may not be tangible immediately. For instance, concentrating all that brain power in two modern buildings is expected to create informal encounters that could stimulate big ideas. A few years from now, ocean-sensing devices developed at the new Scripps lab could be fine-tuned across the street at the testing tank and then deployed on one of the new ships.

“This has been a very deliberate plan to enhance the collaboration,” Haymet said.

The 125,000-square-foot laboratory for the federal Southwest Fisheries Science Center will be the first piece completed late this year. The building will hold major collections, such as plankton from the California Current, and tissue samples from marine mammals and turtles. Other features include pollution-free rooms for analyzing elements in marine specimens and aquaria that can be used for experiments.

“It will allow us to do all of our legacy research a lot more efficiently and it allows us to push the envelope in terms of new technologies,” said Roger Hewitt, assistant director for the fisheries service in La Jolla. “This is a great bridge between the old and the new.”

The building replaces nearby offices that the fisheries service abandoned because they were dangerously close to eroding cliffs. Its centerpiece is a 500,000-gallon pool for developing acoustic and optical devices that help to count and map fish populations without harming them.

“The idea is to have it as a facility to draw people from the region, the nation and the world,” said Cisco Werner, head of the fisheries science center.

Across La Jolla Shores Drive, Scripps plans to start building the Marine Ecosystem Sensing, Observation and Modeling Laboratory in July. Scripps officials said the facility, known as MESOM, will be the first significant expansion of research space at the campus in more than 30 years. Vaughan Hall was built in 1999 to replace a building that was deemed seismically unsafe.

Haymet said the new lab will free up space for a cohort of young professors to expand their teams, a critical element for keeping top talent.

MESOM doesn’t include a big-ticket item like the test tank, but it will house scientists working on related problems in several different buildings. A focal effort will be advancing robotics that can remotely transmit information about far-flung corners of the sea.

“The latest developments and new understanding is occurring at the intersection of the biology of the ocean and physics of the ocean,” said Doug Bennett, a top administrator at Scripps. “The purpose of the building was to bring together scientists at Scripps who are working in several different disciplines that heretofore have been more isolated from each other.”

In addition, the fisheries service is waiting on the arrival of a new research vessel, the Reuben Lasker, which is being built in Wisconsin for delivery in 2013. It will be outfitted with the latest instruments, including acoustic sensors, water-sampling tools and advanced navigation systems.

Scripps also is anticipating the 2015 delivery of a ship the Navy is building for ocean research. Like the Lasker, it will be quieter than the vessel it’s replacing, allowing it to minimize disturbance of marine life under surveillance.

“Despite the (state) budget, there are a lot of good things happening,” said Haymet, who still is seeking a major donor to make a “naming gift” that will help pay for the new Scripps laboratory.